She loves talking about herself in the third person.

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Fiasco Finale

I have Doobster‘s comment yesterday to thank for inspiring the beginning of this follow-up post – THANKS DOOBSTER!

When we left our heroine she was struggling not to scream bloody murder…

… the hose came in contact with the foot rail and of course since it was only “crammed in” it of course made a leap of freedom – and began fountaining all over my carpet.

Cue the melodramatic theme music.

I made a grab for the hose, like I could magically keep it from flooding more of my bedroom while Junior hollered out to JD to turn off the water. Seconds later the deluge ended and we started soaking up what we could with our supply of ShamWow!s. (Yeah, I know that spelling looks weird but you have to see the website to fully understand that it is probably accurate. The ! is part of the trademark name so to insert the “s” between the word and the exclamation point, while grammatically correct, degrades their trademark. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!) Digression aside, ShamWow!s work pretty well at soaking up water once they’re wet themselves. The first round wasn’t very effective but by the time I’d wrung them out and reapplied we were having more success.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I’d plugged the hole in the waterbed and screwed on the cap so we weren’t in danger of re-flooding from that source. Now came figuring out a fix. Jack (you remember him right dear reader?) figured we could just slide the platform toward the foot of the bed. “We” being the guys of course because as we all know I’d already tried scooting the mattress up without any luck. No surprise they didn’t fare any better. Besides the fact that water weighs a ton, the oh-so-clever Jack had forgotten he’d screwed the platform down just moments before. Bright boy, that Jack.

So where did that leave us? If you guessed that we had to remove the semi-full mattress and take apart the bed frame then you would be exactly correct! Sorry, there is no prize.

The men hauled the mattress out and slid it aside into the vanity area off the master bedroom. Then came the grunting, groaning and screeching screwdriver as Jack unscrewed screws and re-positioned the platform while JD and Junior assisted with the headboard and side rails. Soon the last screw had been reapplied and they were ready to re-install the mattress. Success!

Um, not so much.

With the waterbed mattress in place it was immediately clear there was a problem. The mattress didn’t billow out to fill in the corners of the frame as it should have. Instead there was a humongous mound in the middle of the bed.

Finally, they gave up and we decided the wisest course was to drain the mattress and try to flatten it out once it was empty again. Of course that raised the issue of no adaptor and how we were going to do that without recreating the Great Flood (sans animal pairs). JD dismissed Jack and Junior saying we would take it from there, and they sped off before we could call them back. We then let our fingers do the walking and called everywhere we could think of to find an adaptor so we could use our hose to drain the mattress. No one had anything that would work. Oh sure, there were plenty of waterbed drain/fill kits – online! Dammit Jim!

We were left with one option, haul the stupid mattress out of the frame, through the house and onto the front porch where we could open up the drain and let it rip. Figuratively speaking. So JD got busy; I can’t say I was much help. When it comes to upper body strength I’m a lot like cooked linguine.

Now that the mattress was happily spilling its guts onto the ground via our deck we addressed the reassembly of the bed using our standard box springs and king size latex mattress. It had been our original plan so we weren’t too disappointed. That is until we discovered the one question none of us had thought to ask. Geez.

Turns out no matter how hard you try you cannot fit an Eastern king size bed into the frame for a California king size bed. Fuck. FUCK! FUCK!

Sorry, sorry. No. No, I’m not. There is no other word to describe how I felt at that point.

JD flopped down on our old mattress where it lay in our living room and I found a seat and fought back tears of frustration. We remained like that a while, then JD went out to the shed to retrieve his own cordless drill so he could start taking apart the bed frame. At least we could use the platform part and get our mattress up off the floor. We’ll store the headboard and side rails until we either fix the waterbed mattress or replace it.

And the cherry on the sundae? Wouldn’t you know the battery on JD’s cordless drill was dead?

What a great story. I’m just sorry you had to go through all of that. Way back when, in my bachelor days, I had a waterbed. It was cool and it was enough of a curiosity to attract a wide variety of girls to my bed, some just to experience lying in a waterbed; others to experience something more than just lying in my waterbed.
But I digress. I had to get a heater to keep the water in the bladder at body temperature, as it can get pretty cold if not heated. There was a pinhole leak one time (I swear one of my roommates did that, but all I got was denials), and that was a mess. And you’re right, those things are heavy and awkward.
And I’ve also experienced the confusion around a California King and a “standard king. The Cal King is narrower and longer than the standard. I didn’t have an issue with the bed frame, as you did. Just with the fitted sheets. I bought standard king sheets for my Cal King mattress. Not quite the rebuilding project you had, but a hassle nonetheless. Thanks for posting the conclusion to your story.

great two parter, sorry it’s true. water beds scare me slightly, but everyone with a water bed always has at least one great story. not much consolation but hey you got to use, ‘dammit jim’ in a post and that’s pretty awesome!